The story came out of the scenery really. I had just moved to London from Leicester (where I’d returned after Uni in Sheffield), and I absolutely hated it. I just couldn’t get on with the Underground, the unbelievable amount of time it took to get anywhere, the sheer size and riotous expense of the place. The dark, perpetually foggy and dangerous city in the book was just an exaggeration of what I felt, and the rest fell out from there. It started as a riff on how much I disliked living in London, mixed in with a bunch of H.P.Lovecraft that I was heavily into at the time, and somewhere along the line it developed subtext, themes and even, dare I say, a message. –from http://www.chriswooding.com
